As many retailers are extending their channels to both online and offline, consumers nowadays are increasingly buying products across different shopping platforms, ranging from traditional catalog and retail channels to Internet stores. Thus, it is important to understand how the purchasing experiences and the factors surrounding the multichannel shopping environment...
Firms are facing reputational crises with increasing regularity. Despite this, relatively little is known about what types of firm actions consumers will judge to be reprehensible, and how firms should respond once a reputational crisis has occurred. In this dissertation I focus on two specific topics related to firm reputational...
This dissertation investigates two different decision-making strategies, which I label “sub-dimensioning” versus “integration” that individuals employ to cope with feelings of ambivalence. “Sub-dimensioning” is defined as a strategy that involves lower-level construals where an ambivalent decision-maker represents and evaluates an attitude object in terms of its dimensions of evaluation, whereas...
Legitimation is a fundamental social process that describes the solidification of disparate practices, meanings, and material structures into a coherent, stable institution.
In this dissertation, I study the legitimation of casino gambling as it expanded from 1976 to 2006. While scholars have tended to approach the legitimation process from one...
The main objective of this research is to enhance our understanding of consumer behavior in retailing. This objective is accomplished through the analysis of retailers' customer database. This research provides methodologies for retailers to process the large amount of readily available customer data and make more effective marketing decisions.
This...
This dissertation develops and estimates a dynamic model of consumer choice behavior in markets for seasonal (short lifecycle) goods where products have a finite selling season, consumer valuations change over time and availability is limited. In these markets, retailers often use dynamic markdown policies in which an initial retail price...
Consumers often base their decisions on impressions of the overall price level of a store. For example, decisions of where to shop, whether to buy an item or keep looking for a better price, and whether to buy a more or less expensive option can all be influenced by whether...
There is a growing interest in both marketing and economics in the dynamics of decision-making. Researchers have proposed richer behavioral models of consumers and firms with the purpose of learning behavioral primitives that static models cannot capture. In these studies, models move away from stylized views of decision-making by explicitly...
Mixed emotions, defined as the experience of having positive and negative emotions concurrently, can occur in a variety of consumer contexts, ranging from common consumption episodes to important life events. However, while there have been many studies demonstrating the occurrence of mixed emotions, little is known about the downstream consequences...
There is a growing interest in both marketing and economics in the dynamics of decision-making. Researchers have proposed richer behavioral models of consumers and firms with the purpose of learning behavioral primitives that static models cannot capture. In these studies, models move away from stylized views of decision-making by explicitly...
This dissertation consists of three empirical essays on issues related to Internet-based firms entering the offline channel. Issues arising from offline entry include the potential spillovers in online revenue, online customer acquisition, and online customer activity. Over the past decade, there has been considerable research examining brick $\&$ mortar companies...
It has commonly been observed that a person's performance on a self-regulation activity is often impaired when he or she has already performed a prior task that requires substantial self-regulation, a phenomenon termed as the regulatory depletion effect. The prevailing explanation for this effect, as reported in the literature, is...
Assets are ubiquitous, required for consumer behaviors and meaningful in American society. Though assets have a central role in society, they have been considered primarily for what they can buy. This continual focus on assets as an instrument for exchange masks the fact that assets also may serve as a...
In today's marketplace, consumers purchase a basket of goods of different categories from many different types of retail stores. While most marketing literature focuses on studying a single retail chain or a single category, my dissertation considers consumers' collective basket purchases across different retail formats. By doing so, my dissertation...
Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
This dissertation present a Compound Poisson Mixture Regression model of the distribution of transaction frequency and monetary value, and apply it to study donations at a private university in the Midwestern United States. The model captures the joint effect of covariates, recognizing that both response variables emanate from one statistical...
Policymakers and public entities work to make decisions that benefit society. Their choices, though, do not go into effect in a vacuum. Instead, the benefit they provide relies on the underlying consumer behavior that drives responses to those choices. This dissertation studies three different settings in which either policy is...
Affect infusion occurs when feelings elicited by one stimulus (an affect-laden cue) influence reactions to a different stimulus (an attitude object). This effect often happens when the two stimuli are experienced closely in time and space. According to Gestalt principles, a spatial/temporal covariation of the two stimuli can make them...
With the global rise of surveillance technology, contentious episodes may be captured on video from multiple perspectives. These perspectives include the third-person visual perspective such as red-light cameras and dashboard cameras, the first-person visual perspective such as body-worn cameras, and perspectives from written descriptions such as police reports and witness...
People pursuing important goals are known to prefer means that are highly instrumental (those most likely to facilitate goal pursuit). The self-handicapping literature demonstrated an important caveat to this principle—that people instead prefer impediments (rather than instrumental means) to their most important, identity-central goals when they anticipate goal failure. Such...
Digitization has led to dramatic cost reductions and reshaped both what and how products are sold. This dissertation examines the impact of digitization on the behavior of market intermediaries that bring together producers and consumers. Our empirical context is the transition from 35mm film to digital cinema technologies in the...
Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
The US yogurt market has been volatile in the last decade, marked by striking sales increases and dramatic market structure changes. According to an industry report, dollar sales of yogurt in 2017 reached $8.8 billion---a more than 80% increase from 2007. Such remarkable sales growth can be attributed to the...
Technology that processes text, audio and video, as well as location data, has revolutionized many industries by enabling innovative operations for customer retention. To retain transactions for a platform and viewers for advertisers, this dissertation leverages novel digital tools to analyze consumer behavior, proposes original economic frameworks to guide platform...
Pharmaceutical companies pay more than $2 billion to physicians every year. Most of these payments are for food and beverage, speaking, honoraria, consulting, and travel and lodging, which are termed “general payments.” These payments have come under increased scrutiny as critics of pharmaceutical promotion argue that they influence prescribing in...
Cuteness is a popular aesthetic in product design, yet there is a lack of understanding of who is most likely to engage in cute consumption and, more importantly, why. In this dissertation, I consider the role of sex and gender identity in cute consumption, proposing a strong mental association between...